Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The Bumping of Paul Ryan, Analogy Version

Here we have an analogical item from AOSHQ. We'll begin with the AOS lead-comment:

Let us simply accept as a predicate that David Brooks quite definitely considers himself among the educated elite.

And go to the replay of Brooks:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Now back to AOS:

Did you catch that? The public doesn't like the educated class, so -- because of that -- they childishly, petulantly take the position opposite that class.

Rather than: The majority of the public disagrees with this self-declared technocratic soft-socialistic urban would-be elite on most issues, so -- because of that -- their estimation of this small but extraordinarily noisy cohort necessarily diminishes.

Mind you, that 'elite' populates the HQ locations of Citibank, GE, GoldmanSachs, and even WallyWorld.

Not to mention several zillion Gummint agencies such as the State Department, the Fed, Homeland Security, and the UN.

Amidst which David Brooks is merely a zit on the ass of the mammoth, but you get the point. The elites have convinced themselves that they are capable of saving the world (and you bumpkins, too.) Please shut up and allow them to work their magic.

They even told us so: "The System Worked!!"

To which the only rational response is: BUY MORE AMMO!!

UPDATE: For a longer treatment of the Brooks column, see Grim.He covers the broader issues very, very well.